Growing Pains

Why are we being asked to increase our pledges for 2013-14?  The simplest answer is that the proposed expenditures and promised pledges don’t match up. Here’s the rest of the story:

We’re growing younger.

We are saying “good-bye” to some older, more established members of the congregation, who are moving on. Many of them are moving on to new adventures away from Tallahassee. Some are moving to be closer to their adult children. Some have died, leaving us sadder, but, enriched by their sojourn with us. At the same time, we’re experiencing an influx of younger members. Young adults. Young families. We are a vital, growing, “youthening” congregation.

The energy and needs of new members of every age is changing the congregation. Their needs move us to expand Religious Exploration programming by offering courses on parenting, and world religions, and by starting a Spiral Scouts group. Their interests are leading us in new directions in music, and in creating a modest multi-media experience in the sanctuary.

We’re more available.

The 9:00 a.m. service opens a new door for people who want to explore Unitarian Universalism.  Five of our newest members became members solely through attendance at that early service. 

Our internet presence is expanding all the time.  The website continues to grow to meet expressed needs.  We have multiple Facebook pages - disseminating information and encouraging connections. We use the internet for everything from greeter sign-up lists to sharing the concerns of Freethinkers. Thanks to the work of many dedicated members, we are ever more widely represented outside the walls of our congregation.

Our newsletter, the Meridian, is becoming more user friendly for smartphones and tablets. Evolving changes in the newsletter mean that instead of writing one “minister’s column” for the monthly newsletter, I’m writing four times as frequently and posting to this Tallahassee UU blog. 

People are generous. 

Two-thirds of the people who returned their pledges by last week, had already increased their pledges. New members are offering many different kinds of support for the congregation - enlivening our music programs, stepping in to manage the sound system, teaching, joining classes themselves, and helping with the Shelter Meal. Still, to maintain our services and programs, and to protect the accomplishments of the past, including our property and buildings...we need everyone who can be generous to share in the excitement of all our activities and the promises offered by pledging. 

Membership, enthusiasm and energy is up, and pledges are down. Why?

Often younger members, many of them new to Unitarian Universalism, are not able to pledge at the same level as their older counterparts. All of our new members are in the process of becoming established, committed Unitarian Universalists. Every congregation that is growing has an opportunity to experience this same problem.  We are living into the gap created by a younger, growing congregation.  Isn’t it exciting?

The Marrying Kind

        One of our members was asked if he supported equal marriage did that mean he also support polyamorous relationships? He hadn’t given it much thought until the question was posed. While I was not privy to that conversation, I have been a part of others like it, and I have seen how one issue is being used to undermine another. 

About a month ago, a headline blazed “Many Unitarians would prefer that their polyamory activists keep quiet.” That phrase leading into Lisa Miller’s article is misleading in several ways. First, the denomination is the Unitarian Universalist Association; and as cumbersome as that moniker is, it’s members are properly referred to as Unitarian Universalists. That wouldn’t fit neatly into a headline though. Unfortunately, the other thing that didn’t fit into Miller’s article was any documentation that “many” Unitarian Universalists wish polyamory activists would keep quiet. She cites a friend who is studying “to become a Unitarian minister (sic)” who is glad she hasn’t been asked to bless a polyamorous relationship.

Clearly, Miller wishes that polyamory activists would keep quiet, and she wants the UUA to stifle them.

I don’t think that’s the way we do things as Unitarian Universalists.  We let the reality of diversity be known in our midst.  You may not have known until reading this article that Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness (UUPA) exists, but, now that you do, you might seek out the website and absorb some of it’s arguments. You might, in inner dialogue and in conversation with others, grapple with the idea of polyamory -- either in opposition or affirmation. 

Sometime in the late 80’s, a member of the UUA staff published a booklet of civil unions. The booklet included a service for three people. At that time, I decided that I wouldn’t offer a ceremony for three people if asked. Fast forward a quarter century. 

If you’ve ever watched Sister Wives, you’ve seen Kody, Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn Brown negotiate their lives in a polygamous marriage.**  Along with their 17 children, they’ve let cameras into their living rooms and family-led worship.  They’ve let people see good times and bad times, too.  Speaking as a group of wives and husband to an audience, they were hurt and shocked when someone asked if Kody had to take "pills" to keep up with all the wives. They knew, as the questioner did not, that their marriage wasn’t about sex, but, about commitment and caring that encompassed all the members of the family: infants, children and spouses. 

Marriage, when sanctioned by the state, promotes the application of rights for all members of the family.  Marriage, when sanctioned by a religious body, encourages seriously considered commitments and vows of caring that must be lived to be fulfilled.  When adults come to me seeking a blessing for a union they wish to offer each other, I look for caring, commitment and continuity.  Then, my answer can be ‘yes’, even when the state would deny them their legal rights. 

* Miller, Lisa, “Many Unitarians would prefer that their polyamory activists keep quiet”, Washington Post, March 22, 2013,  http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-22/national/37938821_1_unitarian-universalists-union-of-one-man-marriage

Accessed April 16, 2013

** The Browns sued Utah in an attempt to overturn the state’s bigamy law as unconstitutional. In Utah, multiple relationships, not multiple marriage licenses, define bigamy.  Huffington Post, July 25, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/sister-wives-lawsuit-kody-brown-utah-bigamy-law_n_1701450.html

Of Wrestling and Sermons

Almost thirty years ago, when I first sat down at the UUA with Joan Kahn-Schneider to  explain why I wanted to leave social work and become a Unitarian Universalist minister, she offered me a stern lecture on preaching.  She flung out the prospect of weekly preaching as if it was a hurdle that most people would never surmount. 

I've never forgotten what she said, or the fervor with which she made her argument. In fact, I now have over a quarter-century of experience to fuel my own thoughts about preaching.

Somebody, somewhere compared preaching to Jacob wrestling with the angel.  It seems an apt analogy.  The story in Genesis 32: 22-31, recounts a contest that took place in the dead of night.  (We'll skip over the part the reveals Jacob to be a polygamist.) Suddenly, Jacob finds himself fighting with a man.  When it looks like he might prevail, the mysterious man touches his hip and throws it out of joint.  As morning comes on, the two continue to wrestle. The angel grants Jacob a new name, Israel.  And, after the angel refuses tell Jacob who he is, Jacob names the angel Peniel - which means "the face of God." Before departing the angel blesses Jacob. Jacob declares that he has done what his faith tradition told him was impossible - he saw the face of God and lived.

For myself, and I think, for all sermon crafters, writing a sermon requires wrestling with our better selves to get at the truth of our own responses to a topic, an issue, or a question. We want to name our experience as Jacob sought the name of the angel. Sometimes we limp, as if with wounded hip, toward the conclusion of thinking and writing. The blessing we seek is a finished sermon...twenty minutes of monologue that explores one person's interior life and finds expression as something that can be more widely understood. The blessed sermon might make of one person's inner struggle something that could be universally understood.  

That is what makes writing sermons three to four times a month so daunting. It requires deep personal engagement and broad public sharing.  A song that holds out the experience of singer-songwriters asks questions that echo my own:  These nights, are they sent her to amaze me, maybe bury, maybe praise me? ...These nights, am I blazing, am I bleeding, are my secrets worth repeating?  And, the things that I uncover every time I hold my heart up to the lights?*

Then Sunday morning comes, and with it, the blessing of having finished and delivered another sermon.  In twenty-four hours the wrestling begins again. These nights...

* David Buskin and Robin Batteau, These Nights on the album "B&B"

Human By Choice

“It is the ability to choose which makes us human.”  So said Madeleine L’Engle. It seems to me a better marker than opposable thumbs or walking upright. The “ability to choose” is also at the heart of justice issues people are struggling with today.  

One can choose a beloved person, but, may not have the right to marry the beloved.  

One can choose to create a family by bringing children into the family, but, one may not have the right to adopt. 

One can choose to live fully whatever ones abilities and disabilities may be, but, that choice may be severely impinged upon by a society that devalues people with disabilities. 

One can choose to raise healthy, capable children; but, without adequate health care, decent wages, and freedom from the threat of deportation; that choice may be beyond many a family’s reach.

Women have had their right to choose severely limited in many times and places. States are erecting new barricades to separate women from the choices they will make. Many states, Arizona, Minnesota and North Dakota among them, are actively working to make every choice more difficult for pregnant women.  Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute notes: “The point is to make it so difficult to provide abortions that no one will do it. Arizona likes to thumb their nose at women. They take that as a badge of honor.”**

Every issue of choosing to have, or choosing to not have, a child is central to each woman’s ability to know herself as human.  If she makes the choice, with careful thought, and in concert with her values, and in dialogue with her loved ones then she is living into her full humanity.  When the choice is hers, hers is the conscience that will remember the crossroads and reflect on it for all her living days.  And, she will be nothing more or less than human.                                                                                                   

(Note: Our guest in the pulpit on Sunday, April 7 will be Rob Keithan of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.  Rob will address how concern for reproductive choice is becoming a broader concern for reproductive justice. - Robin)

** Yarrow, Alison, “Governor Jan Brewer Signs Arizona’s Extreme New Abortion Law”, The Daily Beast, April 12, 2012.  Accessed April 2, 1013. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/12/governor-jan-brewer-signs-arizona-s-extreme-new-abortion-law.html

Easter Calls

Easter deserves a prominent place in our "liturgical year."  Of course, there is no official "liturgical year" in Unitarian Universalism, but, there are a number of high points in the year that we observe from our own perspective.  Some of those high points have rituals attached.  Every year, most Unitarian Universalist congregations observe a ritual Fire Communion with candles on Christmas Eve.  In September, our congregations observe Water Communion, with it's underlying themes of homecoming and return from summers spent ignoring one's home church in favor of travel and vacations. 

In Spring, there are a number of celebrations Unitarian Universalists observe as touch points.  A few days ago, as our Christian friends were planning the numerous observances associated with Easter, I received an email from the UU Ministry for the Earth emblazoned with the title:  Earth Day is only a month away.  Our abiding concern for the Earth and her future as a healthy planet coupled with the last of our seven principles* leads us to give that day due attention. But the timing of that particular missive seemed to signal a certain shyness about allowing Easter to take it's own place in our calendar. 

In some congregations celebrations for the Spring Equinox take ascendancy. The turning Wheel of the Year brings Wiccans and Pagans around to celebrate the season of rebirth, when the sun calls to Earth and green shoots respond. Some may still invoke Spring’s approach with words I offered in years past: Lady of light, Lady of Joy - Fair and fertile maid, The Lord unlocks the secret door where sacred seeds are laid.  Flora, Venus, Persephone, Diana: by name we set thee free! Goddess of the earth’s delight may we be one with thee!**

For a number of years Unitarian Universalist Seders observing the first night of Passover took prominence as evening celebrations, and as services adapted for Sunday morning as well. Passover promises opportunities to rehearse a history of oppression and liberation. As people who live in a world where oppressions still stifle the yearning of people who long for freedom and equality, we should recall our roles as both oppressor and oppressed in ritual at least once a year.

Yet, as Easter approaches this year, I am reminded of the lessons that co-mingle in long history of Easter traditions and pre-Easter traditions. The dying and rising gods and goddesses of ancient days brought hope of spring’s eternal return to people beyond number.  In the same way, the story of Jesus can be a guide for accepting the plain facts of life. It can be a call to renewed hope. The story of the resurrection might be the story of our own awakening from the death we experience when we cut ourselves off from the powers of life. The story might not be one that finds its conclusion in some far off time, but, in our own hearts. Hearts that have courage to encounter and overturn oppressions. Hearts that love the Earth fiercely, never withdrawing that caring in the face of great obstacles. 

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*   We affirm and promote...respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part.

** Spring Equinox Rite 1996; Bob Gratrix and Katlyn Breene: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~mclennan/OM/K-SEq.txt

If I Believed in Miracles

Miracles are found in most every religious tradition. In Christianity, Jesus is said to have healed the sick, turned water into wine, and raised Lazarus from the dead. The Jewish people had their own history with miracles.  The Red Sea parting to allow Israelites to escape captivity in Egypt provides one outstanding example.  Common sticks also turned into snakes with some regularity during the same time period.  The stories of Buddha’s life that are told and retold lend to the child, the young man, and the monk many miraculous feats.

Almost all founders of religious communities are said to have exhibited the sincerity of their divine mission through the miracles they performed.  This makes sense to a hardheaded skeptic like me.  Imagine the captivating personality of the most spiritually aware person you have ever met.  Consider how the personality of Jesus, Moses, or Buddha might have shone with the fire of their spiritual passions.  Consider how difficult it might be to translate this glowing energy of life to people to people who’d never met them.  Perhaps the only way to convey the compelling genius behind the religious movement would be to tell of healing, water-walking, and flying through the air.

The trouble I have with miracles is not that they are signs trying to speak about an ineffable religious genius, but, that so many of the miracles I’ve heard about seem to come from the same place that inspired the poet Robert Lax to write:

“praise god thought he’s no place in any

astronomic seating plan,

sing still his might for still he can 

wreak havoc on the race of man

he still can shrug the earth a bit

to make your standing towers sit

and quite destroy your joules and volts

with mediocre thunderbolts

he still can tear your towns apart 

while his surrealistic art

grows grass where hitler’s moustache grows

and ferns from hirohito’s toes

fills frank sinatra’s mouth with ashes

and springs a toad from garbo’s lashes

and with some slight celestial mayhem

destroys the shrines of martha graham

and porter cole and coward noel

and splits the earth from pole to pole

or with some ray you haven’t found

sink dante’s hellshaft underground

sing still his might for still he can 

wreak havoc on the race of man”

If I believed in miracles, I would not be attracted to displays of wrath or misplaced might.

If I believed in miracles, I’d know which manifestations of divine power deserved my faithful attention.  Oryen Kusum Lungpa, a Tibetan monk, knows the right miracles to pursue. He asserts that “Flying in the sky, going under the ocean, going through rocks and things like that are minor powers...Many great teachers have flown, caused storms in rainbows, or died leaving no body...But if you have the Ultimate Quality then just by snapping your fingers you can become one hundred images of yourself.  That kind of miracle is very high.” 

If I believed in miracles, I‘d make it my business to know what are the sources of and impediments to miracles.  I would consider that miracles belong to certain ages of human experience. Eliezer Shore, a Jew, teaches:  “The Jewish nation in its youth witnessed the miracles of the Exodus and the desert journey...But as time passed the miracles were hidden and the nation had to progress on its own, to learn the difficult job of serving God in the land.”  If one age produces more miracles than another, I’d want to understand the difference to comprehend my era.

If I believed in miracles, I wouldn’t care that don’t address the needs of thousands and million who suffer on in their presence. I would note, but, wouldn’t mind that Jesus raised one man, Lazarus, and not the thousands of others who died in the years of his public ministry.  I wouldn’t care that other miracle working sages like Kusum Lingpa only intervene in one or two or three deaths in the whole span of their careers. Neither would I worry that miracles often seem poorly timed.  I wouldn’t ask why the god of the Israelites failed to produce a miracle that prevented the Israelites being taken into slavery instead of waiting all those long years to part the Red Sea. And, I wouldn’t ask why wasn’t there a miracle that prevented millions of Africans from being taken into slavery?  Or, a miracle preventing the evolution of Hitler’s horrible final solution for the Jews, homosexuals, and dissenting Christians? If I believed in miracles, miracles that are ‘too little, too late’ wouldn’t bother me.

If I believed in miracles, I wouldn’t scrutinize them for effectiveness.  I wouldn’t ask, “What happens to people raised from the dead? Don’t they die later anyway?”  I wouldn’t worry that some miraculous apparitions like bleeding statues seem to create a only a momentary stir. I wouldn’t wish for a count of the lives wholly changed after witnessing such a miracle. 

If I believed in miracles, I wouldn’t want them watered-down either.  Water down a miracle and you end up with something called a ‘miracle mile’, which we all know is just a stretch of road where hundreds of cars are sold each weekend.  If you shrink a miracle too much you get a phrase like, “It’s a miracle I got here,” breathlessly offered by a late arrival, who merely had to surmount a traffic jam. 

The root meaning of the word ‘miracle’ is ‘wonder.’ Miracles that capture my curiosity are the accessible miracles that inspire wonder.  Miracles that are personal because they touch us profoundly and cause heartfelt reactions.  Miracles that inspire not just wonder, but, joy and awe. Miracles that draw us further into a deepened awareness of life.  

The root behind ‘wonder’ is the word ‘smile.’ Smiles are a part of our earliest activities. Then, as we grow we come to know the miracle of being in a social existence, and our awareness grows with us, until we come to know the miracle of being completely inside one body and yet deeply touched by the life of another human being.

If I believed in miracles, my miracles would grow out of the surprising, smile-inducing events of life.  Most, if not all, of them would arise in wonder, not fear.  They would describe a world filled with awe, not an awful world.  Those miracles might well be smaller than your average miracle.  No one would be raised from the dead.  Seas might never part at human command.  Thunderbolts might only signal an advancing cold front.

If I believed in miracles I would marvel at the miracles Walt Whitman described: “...honey bees busy around the hive...animals feeding in the fields...or the wonderfulness of the sun-down - or of the stars, shining and bright...or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman, or the sick in hospitals...These, with the rest, one and all are to me miracles.”  

If I believed in miracles I would include the kind of miracle Jim Cary described in his essay, Believing.  For him a dream, with religious and spiritual import, was a miracle that became a true fact of his waking life.  A dream that left him “more open and less opinionated than my habitual self-construction.”  All of us who’ve tried to change ourselves know that only miracles make such reconstructions of self possible.  These are the miracles I believe in easily, one after another as I am witness to them.

Perhaps the truth is I do believe in miracles.  I believe in the miracles that attentiveness brings us in nature and in social relations.  I believe in the miracles of inclusion that reveal our place in the grand scheme of life and remind us we are not alone.  I believe miracles that change one’s attitude toward life, without question, or only for one day, or even one hour of one day.  Those other miracles, the ones that topple natural laws, those I still have some trouble understanding.

Faith Leaders and Capital Punishment

    The first Faith Leaders Advocacy Day, organized by Jabari Paul, brought clergy and other leaders together to meet with legislators on a number of issues.  I attended along with others representing Tallahassee Interfaith Clergy and the Tallahassee Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. 
    Unitarian Universalists have supported an end to the death penalty since 1961, following resolutions adopted by the General Assembly in that year. I prepared the talking points below for presentation to the lawmakers faith leaders visited today, it was distributed under the title Capital Punishment Reform.  

If we seek to promote a higher moral path, we should be willing to take that moral path ourselves. State sanctioned capital punishment has the effect of lowering the value of human life, which lowers the moral fabric of society for all, whatever their beliefs. A Quaker group suggests that It "violates our belief in the human capacity for change....[It] powerfully reinforces the idea that killing can be a proper way of responding to those who have wronged us. We do not believe that reinforcement of that idea can lead to healthier and safer communities." 

If we affirm value of every human life, the death penalty denies the sacredness of human life. Life is so precious that nobody should ever be killed or murdered, even by the state. 

The disparity in representation on death row calls into question our ability to live up to the moral principle of affirming every human life.  The following statements are from the Rev. Emory Hingst:

1. “Persons of color are a considerably higher percentage of the Florida Caucasian population and has been since statistics have been kept. This discrepancy has continued for decades despite the Civil Rights Reforms of the 1960’s and 70’s. 
2. Persons of lower economic income means in our culture constitute virtually the entire population of Florida’s Death Row as the accused, without adequate financial resources do not receive adequate investigative and legal assistance for trial. The American Bar Association has proposed changes to ameliorate this lack of fairness in several approaches for many years with minimal change to date.

Our attitudes toward capital punishment have evolved in the crucible of American freedoms. Since the Bible was written, society has changed its attitudes toward what deserves the death penalty. “We eliminated the death penalty for pre-marital sex, adultery, practicing a different religion, engaging in prostitution, homosexual behavior, blasphemy, rebellion by teenagers, etc. We should eliminate it for murder as well.”

Can any of us escape the need for mercy?  In John 8 Jesus turns aside a verdict of death by stoning. The river that runs through us all carries love and hate, and inspiration for wonderful acts of mercy as well as the capacity for murder.  When we accept our own faults, we have room to offer compassion to those who have committed crimes, as well as their victims.

“The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ ...When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, sir.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” 

As human beings, we have limitations and our judgements delivered through the court system are liable to grievous error.  Innocent men and women have been executed by the state.  In Florida, thirteen people formerly on death row, have been exonerated with DNA evidence. Those thirteen served 259 years in prison for crimes they did not commit, and they stood to lose their lives for crimes they did not commit. Just as murder victims cannot be brought back to life, so too, an innocent person, once executed, cannot be brought back to life.

There are effective, moral alternatives to capital punishment.  When Cain murdered his brother Abel, God set several punishments around him, and made him a wanderer; and he also put a mark on him that would protect him from the murderous intent of others.  In our day, one alternative to capital punishment is life imprisonment which creates a painful isolation from society.  In addition, life imprisonment is less costly to the state than nearly endless cycles of appeal.  

There is no evidence that the state can protect people from crime with capital punishment. The sentence of life imprisonment appears to be at least as effective as capital punishment in deterring crime. Florida is second only to California in the number of people awaiting the death penalty.  There are 411 men and women on death row in Florida.

  Lest, we think that Florida is more murderous than almost every other state in the union, note that Florida ranks seventeenth in murders.

Coupled with all the concerns above - especially the disparity in sentencing - it is hard to escape a conclusion that the state’s continued use of capital punishment continues a long and devastating history of racial bias in our country.  As people of faith we seek to extend love and compassion to all, without bias.